Taylor Swift Is Latest Addition to Shakespeare Scholar's Course Offerings

This August, students at The University of Texas are breaking out their cardigans and hoping there's a blank space on the roster for a brand new class that focuses on the style of Taylor Swift's songs.

English professor Elizabeth Scala at The University of Texas teaches a handful of courses on medieval literature, focusing on the works of Shakespeare, gothic and Romantic medievalism, and Victorian book history, among other specialties.

However, this fall, first-year undergraduates in the Liberal Arts Honors program have a chance to get to know Swift's songs all too well by taking a class called "Literary Contests and Contexts—The Taylor Swift Songbook."

According to a Facebook post from the university's English department, the course "provides an introduction to literary studies and research methods that uses the songwriting of @taylorswift as the basis for teaching a wide range of skills."

"Let's turn that Easter Egg hunting and reading in detail to academic purposes!" the post said.

Scala told Newsweek, "The course I am teaching is a basic intro to literary critical reading and research methods in English." She added that she created the topic "The Taylor Swift Songbook" last year "because I'd been listening to the re-release of Red with my swiftie daughter."

The course, which already has an Instagram account under the username @swiftieprof, is expected to be a small, but full, seminar class for the fall '22 semester.

Scala told Newsweek that the class may be taught in a larger setting later on, but the smaller, discussion-based class was the best option for how she wished to teach it.

"I think it makes it more desirable as a class to have it in that form," Scala said. "No one needs just to listen to what I have to say. I want the students to find a new language to express their intuitive appreciation of her writing skills and talent."

"I do typically teach medieval classes, particularly on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a work in which he adopts different personae to tell various stories," Scala said. "It makes Folklore resonate for me."

In order to answer the question, "Why Swift?" Scala told Newsweek, "Swift is an intelligent and talented songwriter, and her writing skills are what made me focus on her. For me, it's all about form (not just or even primarily about content). We will study Swift's songs as poems and literary structures."

She added that there was something unique about Swift re-recording her past albums. "That cultural context (of re-recording and rewriting the music industry) is also interesting for the course's purposes (the research part). Swift is the focus because she is an exceptional writer and creative talent, and speaks to her audience today in ways others don't," Scala said.

Updates on the course will be provided on Instagram over the course of the semester, and Scala said that "Since Swift uses social media so well to communicate with her fans, making an IG account seemed really natural to me for the class. Plus so many can't take it—our room is small—and I wanted to be able to share with everyone a little of what we are doing."

But Scala isn't the first to create a class right out of her wildest dreams. Students at New York University (NYU) have also searched for the message in Swift's proverbial bottle.

At the same school where Swift received her Honorary Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts, a course taught by Rolling Stone's Brittany Spanos launched in January and was taught through March, covering Swift's evolution as a musician, while also diving into the legacy of pop and country songwriters and the politics of race in contemporary popular music, according to Variety.

And students who are less enchanted by Swift are free to keep driving to San Marcos, where a course on Harry Styles will be taught at Texas State University next spring.